Slow to the point of unusability

Hello,
I'm having problems with partition management in Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 being extremely slow. I've used Paragon products since Paragon 5 and never had this problem before.
The computer is a reasonably fast desktop with Win 8 on SSD and an IDE 320Gb WD 3200JB drive temporarily cabled in to change its partitions.
Thee IDE drive has been checked for errors (none). There are three partitions:
NTFS (blank) 50Gb - NTFS (with data) 240 Gb - Linux Ext2 (with data) 20 Gb
I'm merging the left two partitions. It has taken 2 days so far and hasn't got past the first stage. Is that normal This has taken so long that I no longer need the partitions to be merged - I used a different drive for the job that I was going to use that disk for becauseI was unable to wait for Paragon.
Paragon12 now says I can't abort the process because it might lose data!
I welcome advice.
For future jobs, would it be better to go back to an earlier version? I have copies of Paragon 8.4 and 5.6.
Best wishes and thanks in advance,
Terry

years ago when I interrupted a partition operation that was taking too long and frozed, my 500gb drive became RAW. There was over 400p GB of data on the drive.
I had to use testdisk to find the lost partitions, long story short it, it found the missing partitions and then chkdsk kicked in automatically to reindex all the data, it took a couple of hours but I didnt lose any data.
If your drive freezes, you will still be able to recover most of your data. The most I wait on any partition operation is about 3 hours before I pull the plug, especially if I dont see any progress.